Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2014
From Putting People First
Beautiful users: book and exhibition
BOOK Beautiful Users: Designing for People Edited and designed by Ellen Lupton Princeton Architectural Press, 2014, 144 pages In the mid-twentieth century, Henry Dreyfuss, widely considered the father of industrial design, pioneered…
From Putting People First
Putting People First blog redesigned
Experientia’s Putting People First blog has been redesigned. It is now entirely responsive, allows for easier browsing, searching, and filtering, and features larger images on the posts. The entire history of posts remains accessible…
From The Eponymous Pickle
3D Printed Chocolate
Printing chocolate. " ... Out of all the companies out there, one instantly pops into most individual’s heads when they think of creamy, rich chocolate, and that is Hershey. With the history, the market reach, and the drive…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Delivers in one Hour in NYC
In the WSJ: Amazon Unveils One-Hour Delivery Service. Program Is for Prime Customers in New York, Includes Over 25,000 Products. ... " . Additional charge. Expanding areas. Attempting to further own customer relationship…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson Almost Lost
In today's Cognitive Systems Institute talk, Jim Hendler of RPI mentions how close Ken Jennings came to winning the fabled Jeopardy competition ... check out his TED talk about the event and his reflections. (via Jim Spohrer)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Reproducing Scent
In Fastcoexist: A kind of biomimicry. We worked on related ideas when in the food business. " ... Scent Of A Rose, With Designer Microbes .... Stop and smell the genetically engineered yeast. .... ". Now for dealing with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson and Academia
In today's Cognitive Systems Institute presentation, Jim Hendler from RPI presented "An Academic Perspective on Watson.". Nicely done, in particular a comparison of the fundamentals of the expert systems we built in the 90s,…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
35 Innovators Under the Age of 35
Each year MIT Technology Review publishes a list of 35 innovators under the age of 35. Recently, they published the list for 2014. All 35 of these people are doing exciting work that could shape their fields for decades. But …
From Schneier on Security
ISIS Cyberattacks
Citizen Lab has a new report on a probable ISIS-launched cyberattack: This report describes a malware attack with circumstantial links to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In the interest of highlighting a developing threat…
From The Eponymous Pickle
University Mobile App Strategy
Not sure if this is rare. Have been part of related work for enterprises. In particular this could be best seen as a broader strategy about getting focused data to people that need it. Wherever they are. And once you have…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sony Competes with Google Glass
In CWorld: Early this year was involved with a proposed project with Google Glass that regrettably did not happen, read more about that here. Now Sony is competing with an hands free information model.Toshiba and others are "…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Energy Saving Game
In Fastcodesign: A way to turn household energy saving into what they call an addictive game. Called Power House, on Facebook. Mentioned by collaborator Byron Reeves at Stanford:" .... As it happens, Power House was developed…
From Putting People First
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From Schneier on Security
The Limits of Police Subterfuge
"The next time you call for assistance because the Internet service in your home is not working, the 'technician' who comes to your door may actually be an undercover government agent. He will have secretly disconnected the service…
From Computational Complexity
The NIPS Experiment
The NIPS (machine learning) conference ran an interesting experiment this year. They had two separate and disjoint program committees with the submissions split between them. 10% (166) of the submissions were given to both committees…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building a Simple Word Cloud
A simple word cloud service, data can be retrieved from pasted text, URLs or files. A number of useful features for quick generation. Their blog provides some good usage examples.
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP IOT Garden
Work and thoughts by SAP on IoT Innovation, in a Garden:" ... Within SAP, IoT has begun taking shape in the form of grassroots projects and pilot implementations to fully validated solutions with external partners.SAP Palo Alto…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Too many Arrows in the Quiver?
Last week I saw a tweet complaining to Wonder Workshop about them using Blockly to program their robots when (apparently) the Kickstarter proposal said the would be programmable using Scratch. A conversation ensued as it is likely…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for CCC Council Nominations
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) issued a call today for nominations for individuals to serve on the CCC Council for the next three years. The deadline for nominations is February 6, 2015. See complete details — including…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Optimizing polymorphic code in Java
Oracle’s Java is a fast language… sometimes just as fast as C++. In Java, we commonly use polymorphism through interfaces, inheritance or wrapper classes to make our software more flexible. Unfortunately, when polymorphism is…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brain Marketing
In the HBR: Using the activity of the brain to understand purchasing and marketing decisions. We called this neuromarketing, but that term is never used in the article. " ... Brain Marketing: Is the Product Worth the Price…
From The Eponymous Pickle
China Boosting Robotics
In CWorld: " ... Already a major manufacturer of electronics, China is preparing to bolster its presence in robotics with the help of government support and investments.China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
New NIH Big Data to Knowledge Funding Opportunities
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) program has announced two new funding opportunities for FY15 funding. NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative Research Education: Massive Open Online Course…
From Schneier on Security
How the FBI Unmasked Tor Users
Kevin Poulson has a good article up on Wired about how the FBI used a Metasploit variant to identity Tor users....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Stanford High Rise Chip
In CWorld: New three dimensional design. Potential for IoT and Big Data applications." ... Stanford University researchers have built a multi-layered "high-rise" chip that could significantly outperform traditional computerUsing…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Prover’s Block
What to do when afraid to see if what you want is true Cropped from Canadian Bergler Society source Edmund Bergler coined the term in 1947, the great writers Francis Fitzgerald—F. Scott to most—and Joseph Conrad among many others…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How to Fly a Horse
Colleague Kevin Ashton writes:Dear Franz, My new book, "How to Fly a Horse — The Secret History of Invention, Creation, and Discovery," comes out on January 20.It is already getting some good reviews: both Fortune and Business…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Measuring Content Metrics: All About the Data
In Adage: On how to measure digital content. Which relates to the more general aspect of Data Assets. Which I have repeated here and given a talk about. It's all about context in business process. It requires having some…
From Schneier on Security
Fake Cell Towers Found in Norway
In yet another example of what happens when you build an insecure communications infrastructure, fake cell phone towers have been found in Oslo. No one knows who has been using them to eavesdrop. This is happening in the US,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Where do you Start With the Internet of Things?
Good piece on the topic. by James MacLennan. There is lots of talk everywhere of course, but what do you do to fit his into a business? We spent years thinking about this when it was mostly implemented with RFID. Now the…